Sylvester looked past his outstretched hand. “You’ll want to be careful, Nancybeth. A brandy hangover’s not pleasant.”
“Dear mother Sylvester,” she simpered. “What’d I tell you, Farny? Expert on everthn’. I never heard of this stuff ’fore she innerduced me.” Nancybeth batted her bulb of apple brandy from hand to hand. On the third toss she missed, and Farnsworth snatched it out of the air for her, returning it without comment.
“Understand you had a very pleasant visit to the south of France, Mrs. Sylvester,” Farnsworth said, braving her determined unpleasantries.
Sylvester gave him a look intended to silence him, but Nancybeth piped up brightly. “She had verry pleasan’ two days. Three days? I had verr’ boring three weeks.”
“Mr. Farnsworth,” Sylvester hastily interrupted, “your attempt to pump my companion for information that you imagine may somehow be of use to you is . . . is transparent.”
Nancybeth’s eyes widened—”Pump me? Why, Mister Farmerworthy”—and she snatched dramatically at the billowing skirt of her flowery print dress.
“And despicable,” Sylvester added.
But Farnsworth pretended to take no notice. “No offense meant, Mrs. Sylvester. Light chat, that’s all. Comes to business, much prefer to talk to you straight from the shoulder. Eh?”
Nancybeth growled, “Man to man, so to speak,” then pretended to flinch when Sylvester glared at her. Evidently she was farther into her cups than Sylvester had feared.
“Got me wrong, Mrs. Sylvester,” Farnsworth said smoothly. “Represent your interests too, y’know. In a sense.”
“In the sense that you’ll be forced to pay your clients whatever sum you can’t weasel out of?”
He drew himself up a bit. “You’ve nothing to fear, Mrs.
Sylvester. Star Queen would dock safely with your cargo even if she were a ghost ship. Take more than a measly meteoroid to do in a Rolls-Royce robot, what?”
Throughout their exchange Nancybeth was contorting her face into a series of exaggerated masks, miming first Sylvester’s aloof contempt, then Farnsworth’s wounded innocence. It was the sort of childish display that under some circumstances lent her a gamin attractiveness. At the moment she was about as attractive as a two-year-old on a tantrum.
“Thanks for your interest, Mr. Farnsworth,” Sylvester said coldly. “And perhaps you would leave us alone now.”
“Let me be blunt, Mrs. Sylvester, begging your pardon —”
“No, why don’t you be pointed?” Nancybeth suggested Farnsworth pushed on. “After all, we’re both aware of the difficulties of the Pavlakis Lines. Eh?”
“I’m aware of no such thing.”
“Doesn’t take much imagination to see what Pavlakis had to gain by doing in his own ship. Eh?”
“Nancybeth, I’d like you to leave with me, this moment,”
Sylvester said, turning away.
“But he did it rather badly, didn’t he?” Farnsworth said, floating closer to Sylvester, his voice deeper and harsher. “No significant damage to the ship, no damage whatever to the cargo? Not even that famous book you were so interested in?”
“Don’ forget crew,” cried Nancybeth, still the giddy imp. “Tried to kill ’em all!”
“Good God, Nancybeth . . .” Sylvester glanced across the lounge to where Nikos Pavlakis hovered over his ouzo.
“How can you say such a thing? About a man you’ve never met?”
“Only got half of ’em, though,” the girl finished. “Good ol’ Angus won through.”
“That’s a shrewd guess, Mrs. Sylvester, and I’d lay odds she’s right.” Farnsworth’s insinuating gaze narrowed melodramatically.
“Pavlakis Lines holds rather large accidental-death policies on its crewmembers—did you know that?”
Her eyes fastened on his, almost against her will. “No, Mr. Farnsworth, actually I didn’t.”
“But suicide, though. Now there’s another matter. . . .”
Sylvester jerked her gaze away from him. Something about his teeth, his gingery hair, set her stomach to seething.
She glared at Nancybeth, who peered back in fuddled and exaggerated innocence. Taking hold of a nearby con- venience rail, Sylvester turned her back on both of them and launched herself hastily outward, into the gloom.
“Bye-bye, Sondra . . . sooorry we made you mad,”
Nancybeth crooned as Sylvester disappeared through the nearest doorway. She squinted at Farnsworth. “Suicide?
‘Sat mean you don’ have to pay Grant? I mean, for Grant?
’Cause he killed himself?”
“Might mean.” Farnsworth peered back owlishly. “Unless he didn’t, of course.”
“Didn’t? Oh, yeah . . . an’ if he was murdered?”
“Ah, murder. Gray area, that.” Farnsworth tugged at the knot of his blood-colored polymer tie. “I say, been awfully good. But ’fraid I must run.”
“Yes, Wusspercy,” cooed the abandoned Nancybeth. So that’s what he’d wanted from her, nothing more than a conversation with Syl. “Run along, why don’t you? And while you’re at it, take a hint from Commander Grant . . . ? Lose your body too.”
Across the room, not far away, Nikos Pavlakis floated near the bar with his bulb of ouzo and his bag of olives.
He was well aware that they had been talking about him.
His temper urged him to confront Farnsworth, to call him to immediate account, but his business sense urged him to stay calm at all costs. He was frantic over the condition of his beautiful new ship. He was almost equally sorrowful for the man Grant, who had been a dependable employee of his and his father’s for many years, and for Grant’s widow and children. He was even more apprehensive about the prospects of McNeil, another good man. . . .
Pavlakis thought he knew what had happened to Star Queen. To him it was retrospectively obvious, transparently so—but not, he hoped, to anyone else. Nor could he afford to breathe a word of his suspicions to anyone.
Farnsworth least of all.
As Helios slid into its parking orbit near Port Hesperus, Sparta was poking about in Angus McNeil’s private cabin on Star Queen.
She’d quickly looked through the galley, the personal hygiene facility, the common areas. She’d found nothing inconsistent with McNeil’s account. A slot in the medicine chest which would have held a tiny vial of tasteless, odorless poison was vacant. There were two packs of playing cards in the drawer of the table in the common room, one of which had never been opened, one of which had been handled by both McNeil and Grant—McNeil’s traces were strongest, although Grant had gripped one card tightly.
She noted its face.
After the common areas Sparta had visited the pilot’s cabin next. It had not been entered since Wycherly was last on the ship, before it left Falaron Shipyard.
Grant’s cabin, then—notable mostly for what it failed to reveal. His bed was still made, the corners squared off and the blanket so tight one could have bounced a nickel off it at one gee. His clothes were neatly folded in the restraining hampers. His bookshelf and personal-computer files were mostly electronics manuals and selfimprovement books; there were no signs that Grant did any reading for pleasure or had any hobbies except fiddling with microelectronics. The promised letters to his wife and children were clipped to the little fold-down writing desk, and Sparta left them there after ascertaining that no one except Grant had touched them. McNeil, if he’d been curious about their contents—as well he might have been—had had the integrity to leave them strictly alone.
In fact there was no trace of McNeil’s presence anywhere in the room.
There was another letter, addressed to McNeil himself, in Grant’s desk drawer. But as McNeil had not searched the drawer, presumably he did not know of its existence.
McNeil’s cabin painted a portrait of quite a different man. His bed had not been made for days, perhaps weeks— Sparta noted purplish splotches of spilled wine on the sheets that, if he’d been telling the truth about not getting into Hold A after Grant changed the combination, had been there since four days after the explosion. His clothes were in a jumble, jammed into the hampers of his locker.
His chip library was a fascinating mix of titles. There were works of mysticism: the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, a treatise on alchemy, another on the Cabala. And of philosophy: Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.
Some of McNeil’s books were real, photogrammed onto plastic sheets that imitated the paper of a hundred years ago. Games: a slim little book on parlor magic, another on chess, another on go. Novels: Cabell’s odd Jurgen, a recent work of the Martian futurists, Dionysus Redivivus.
McNeil’s personal computer files revealed a different but similarly wide range of interests—it took Sparta only moments to discover that he had been playing master level chess with his machine, that he had carefully followed the London, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong stock exchanges, that he subscribed to a variety of clubs, from rose-of-the-month to wine-of-the-month. Wine and roses—he must collect several months’ worth of each, between trips.
There were other files on the computer, protected by passwords that would have stopped a casual browser but which were so trivial Sparta barely noted them—files that made full use of the machine’s high-resolution graphics.